What metrics will you use to calculate the happiness index of customers for the Medium blog?

Clarifying Questions

• What do we mean by Medium blog? - the complete site medium.com
• What do we mean by customers - writers or readers? - readers
• What do we mean by the happiness index? - is it a metric how happy people are with the product - can we assume it as a variation of the customer satisfaction score or do we need to consider if people feel happy using the product?

Structure

I will first discuss the main users and usage of the Medium platform

Then proceed to consider what happiness could mean to a user consuming content on Medium

Further, I will discuss a few metrics that could contribute to the Happiness Index

Then I will summarize

The Medium Blog

Medium blog has been created by Evan Williams, who was initially the founder of blogger and had sold it to Google. There was no place where users could discover new content and there was no place where writers could just focus on writing great content. Medium is a new-age blog and content distribution system that helps ease the challenges by the readers and the writers. 

Writers

1. Don't want to focus on the technical aspects of the blog
2. Don't want tens of options about formatting writing
3. Want to build a loyal following of readers on the platform
4. Want to experiment with various ways of producing engaging content
5. Want to send emails and other content along with just writing blogs to keep readers aware about new posts

Readers

1. Want one place for all their reading needs
2. Don't want to adjust or reset the look and feel of the product again and again while reading content
3. Want to read, review, save and come back to read the articles later
4. Want to engage meaningfully with the creators of the post

Happiness for Readers

As a reader and avid user of Medium myself, I am happy when I repeatedly read content that I feel is extraordinary. I look forward to writings of these authors, provide the posts with likes and claps.

User Journey of Readers

Awareness

1. Land on an article from various sources

Activation

1. Read first article
2. Create account

Retention

1. Follow writers, subscribe to magazines
2. Save articles
3. Read multiple times a day or multiple days in a week

Referral

1. Share articles

Revenue

1. Subscribe to Medium

Happiness Index for Readers - Since we are talking about happiness index for readers, I will consider the Retention, Revenue and Referral related metrics since that is where more engaged users tend to be in the lifecycle.

Awareness

Activation

Retention

• N Day Retention measured at 7, 14, 30 days to see how many users are finding value in the content they are reading
• Number of posts read per sessions - if users are finding value in the content, they usually spend more time reading per session
• Number of likes per Number of posts read - if users enjoyed reading a post, they end up liking it
• Number of claps per Number of posts read - the higher the number of claps, the higher the engagement
• Number of writers followed - the higher the number of writers followed, the higher better the feed, and higher the engagement
• Number of magazines subscribed - magazines are a unique feature of medium where multiple articles written by various authors are curated and published for the end users
• Number of daily subscription email opens, clicks

Revenue

• Percentage of new users who subscribe to medium - MoM/WoW/QoQ
• Percentage of users who continue to renew subscriptions

Referral

• Number of shares per post created - plotted as a histogram, should tend to move rightward over time
• Number of users inviting other users to medium

Summary

The happiness of a user is a complex metric that depends on a variety of factors. After discussing high-level successes for users, we dove deep to understand a few metrics that contribute to the happiness of the users. A consistent dip in each of these metrics could result in an overall reduction of happiness for the users.